Oh, Canada……

Oh, Canada……

Andrew Goodman, of Traffick.com and Page Zero Media, and I are if not friends, well, at least peers with a mutual and healthy respect for each other both knowing exactly how long the other has been at this Search (whether paid or otherwise) stuff in this country. Over the years we've lunched, coffee'd and conferenced together.

And always, one theme has come up. When and why did Canada miss the boat when it comes to search and the Internet?

I'm Vice President Business Development at Search Engine People.
Prior to joining SEP, I spent 10 years with Canada's original search engine, the Yellow Pages Group. I worked in several key Departments including Marketing, Business Development, eProducts, Local and National Sales.
My passion is my family. When not attending my Daughters soccer games, piano & dance lessons or school assembly, I'm focused on delivering strong result for our clients and researching and writing about local search, Yellow Pages, mobile marketing and social media.

7 Comments

I usually tell my Canadian clients to buy both the .ca and the .com (if both are available). Even for small local businesses that will never be expanding outside their city. If only to capture the type in traffic that forgets it was supposed to be a .ca

When it comes to Canadian web surfers, they know the .ca extension and it can instill a certain level of trust for a website to fellow Canadians.

But again, it is all about that actual target market of the website and its visitors.

As a hypocrite, I use the .ca for my personal blog only because the .ca of my nickname was actually available and my blog was a good use for that domain. So what if it's a .ca when my real audience is North America, maybe global. Oh well, I like my domain

But if I can motivate even a handful of folks to move beyond "oh well" to "I'd better give this some serious thought," I'll be happy.

"Oh well" is fine for a personal blog or for a single-owner pizza place (maybe), but for businesses with a potentially global audience, "oh well" is not how the rest of the world, particularly U.S. customers, view things.

Let's not take the "oh well" sentiment to far guys. I was referring to my personal blog.

Now to the TorStar news. It's much like the music industry dropping the ball on music downloads. If the free classified websites are eating that heavily into their market share then why the hell should these newspapers hold onto their old business model of paid classifieds? They already have the traffic streams. Offer the classifieds for free and monetize them with other forms of advertising. Tie the classifieds into their other verticals too.

Instead they will resist the unstoppable changes brought by the internet only to have to "throw in the towel". Perhaps Kijiji has too much traction now in Canada and its already too late for the newspapers???

First off, you're bang on Andrew in terms of the Star "doing the opposite of throwing in the towel on the digital side."

I've seen it first hand as our website, RaptorsHQ.com, used to be the lone daily source for Raptor blogging news. However this year both the Star and Globe have jumped onboard with Raptorblogs by their basketball columnists and the Star in particular has devoted a good deal of time elbowing into the NBA's blogosphere.

Second – Just wanted to say that the class you lead for my CMA e-marketing certification was the best one yet. Great work. And thanks for the advice on optimizing url's for individual pages…got our tech guy working on it right now!